The Pittsburgh Urban Gardening Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating people in ways to live healthy, sustainable lives. We plant, grow and harvest fruits and vegetables around Pittsburgh with the goal of turning city streets into healthy eats.

Our friends over at Fittsburgh just put together an awesome article on Urban Gardening & Farming in Pittsburgh. Well worth the few minutes it takes to read if you're interested in starting a garden, raising bees or keeping farm animals on your property. Check it out....

After gardening until sunset - there is nothing to top off your day like a handful of fresh raspberries. For those of you that are not familiar with foraging for berries, the week leading up to the 4th of July and (depending on weather) potentially the week following the 4th of July are typically the best for black raspberry foraging in Western Pennsylvania. Rain has been good this year so hopefully the harvest is just as plentiful!!!

We just partnered with the owners of Mindful Brewing, a new micro-brewery that is under construction in Castle Shannon, to offer the "Mindful Market." This farmers market will be set up from 9 am - 2 pm the 2nd Sunday of every month from 6/14 - 10/11.

The address is 3759 Library Road in Castle Shannon - the site of the former McGinnes Brothers Market.

Here is a shot of the arugula that we'll be selling along with the below list of additional vendors and grocery items.

They say corn should be knee high by the 4th of July so if you haven't planted it yet, you're running a little behind schedule. I planted some on 7/7/2014 and got very little out of it so I highly recommend getting your corn in ASAP if you haven't already. This post is a little late, I planted back at the beginning of June and the crop is about 1 foot high at this point.

It's official, we're running a farmers market the 2nd Sunday of every month at 3759 Library Road in Castle Shannon. These markets will be in the parking lot of the future microbrewery - Mindful Brewing. We're dubbing the market the "Mindful Market" in tribute. Keep an eye out for the list of confirmed vendors!

After 2 weeks the seeds performing the worst were Batch 3 (the seeds soaked in tap water with soap for 2 days). Even the dry seeds had more sprouts at this point and Batch 1 was starting to show signs of Tomato leaves, no longer solely sprout leaves. I feel comfortable at this point concluding that you should soak your seeds in tap water. Next batch, I will test soaking times against each other (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 days).

4/12 - All of my seeds for the year arrived in the mail today. I purchased them from www.rareseeds.com and really like the website. They have multiple varieties of almost every single plant you can imagine and are extremely informative. The user reviews are also very extensive so that helped me in my decision making process regarding which seeds to buy.

Now a science experiment. I've been reading that soaking your seeds for anywhere from 1-5 days prior to planting helps them grow faster and healthier. I've also read that, in order to keep bacteria down during this process, it's good practice to add a hint of Dial Gold hand soap to the water. I decided to test these theories. I will be planting 3 batches of San Marzano Tomatoes.

Batch 1 - soaked in tap water for 2 days

Batch 2 - soaked in tap water with a hint of dial gold soap for 2 days